WASHINGTON – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday
that it will begin a review to determine whether the Sonoran
talussnail is threatened, specifically by the proposed Rosemont Copper
mine.

The action
is in response to a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity,
which claims that the snail is just one of several species of plants and
animals threatened by the proposed mine southeast of Tucson.

“They’re going to blast a mile-wide open pit,” said Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist for the center. “That would literally just blow up the populations of the snail.”

But Kathy Arnold, the vice president for environmental and regulatory affairs at Rosemont Copper, said the mine will not harm the snail population, calling the center’s claims a “fabrication” and “overstatements.”

“The U.S. Forest Service is working through an environmental impact statement,” Arnold said. “They are the ones, along with the Fish and Wildlife Service, who will decide what kinds of impacts we will have, not the Center for Biological Diversity.”

Tuesday’s announcement will not have an immediate impact on the
development of the mine while the government evaluates the snail’s
population. But Fish and Wildlife will take the
mine’s potential impact on the snail into consideration during its
review, said Steve Spangle, a field supervisor for a Fish and Wildlife
Service office in Arizona.

“We look at all the threats to any species,” Spangle said. “Certainly
if we look at any project, whether it’s a mine, logging, grazing or
whatever, we certainly look into that.”

But even if the service determines after its review that the snail
should be a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act,
Spangle said it would not become eligible for listing until 2016 at the
earliest.

He said the agency has been trudging through a backlog of cases resulting from the 2011 settlement
of a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit over the status of 757
species nationwide. That will delay the status review, which he said the
agency does not anticipate completing until after 2016.

“We can only do so much. The more these (endangered species
petitions) keep piling on, the more we’ll deal with them, but through
2016 our listing schedule is set,” Spangle said. “We only have a finite
amount of resources.”

The center filed another suit against the Fish and Wildlife Service
in June, saying it failed to meet a 12-month deadline to answer an
endangered species petition for Coleman’s coralroot, an orchid that
Curry said would also be impacted by the mine.

Curry said the center is most concerned with the mine’s impact on the
snail, which it calls “rare,” but that it is also worried about the
effect of grazing, fire, invasive plants and drought.

The center is also seeking protection for the Rosemont talussnail.

A spokesman for Fish and Wildlife noted that the number of Sonoran
talussnails is unknown and that there is an overall dearth of data on
the species.

“We do recognize the threat from fire-carrying invasive plants and
potentially mining,” Jeff Humphrey, the spokesman, said in an email.
“That together with the lack of current information is why we’ve
initiated a more thorough status review and are earnestly seeking
additional information regarding the Sonoran talussnail.”

Arnold said it is hard to see how a snail can be termed rare when no survey has been done on its population in almost 40 years.

“To say that they’re rare is like saying you lose something and it’s
all of a sudden rare, even though you haven’t found it because you
haven’t looked for it,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service time frame for evaluating whether or not the snail is threatened. The agency does not anticipate completing its review until 2016.

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